Logicomix Re: The Devil & Tom Foley Walker

Sat Aug 8 10:39:14 CDT 2009

If you love reading about mathematics have you ever read:

The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics,the Kabbalah, and the Search for 
Infinity
by Amir D. Aczel (author of 'Fermat's Last Theorem'). Publisher WSP- 
Washington Square Press

This is the story of Georg Cantor, who also makes an appearance in 
Logocomix.

Simon

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kevin Dunn" <kevindunn27 at gmail.com>
To: "Simon Bryquer" <sbryquer at nyc.rr.com>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 08, 2009 10:56 AM
Subject: Re: Logicomix Re: The Devil & Tom Foley Walker

Wow! Thanks for that! Can't wait for the Poincaré episode, as he is my
favorite mathematician (though Hilbert is a close second). I love
reading about the history of mathematics, the next book I plan to read
on that subject is a novelization of the theoretical personal
relationship between Hardy and Ramanujan: "The Indian Clerk."

Why do I have to wait until Sept 28 for Logicomix? Boo

K

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 8, 2009, at 9:34 AM, "Simon Bryquer" <sbryquer at nyc.rr.com> wrote:

> Logicomix ---- Paperback Pub date in Sept.
>
> This title might be of interest to Pynchon readers.
>
> Here's a brief description from the website:
>
> Covering a span of sixty years, the graphic novel Logicomix was  inspired 
> by the epic story of the quest for the Foundations of  Mathematics.
>
> This was a heroic intellectual adventure most of whose protagonists  paid 
> the price of knowledge with extreme personal suffering and even  insanity. 
> The book tells its tale in an engaging way, at the same  time complex and 
> accessible. It grounds the philosophical struggles  on the undercurrent of 
> personal emotional turmoil, as well as the  momentous historical events 
> and ideological battles which gave rise  to them.
>
> The role of narrator is given to the most eloquent and spirited of  the 
> story’s protagonists, the great logician, philosopher and pacifi st 
> Bertrand Russell. It is through his eyes that the plights of such great 
> thinkers as Frege, Hilbert, Poincaré, Wittgenstein and Gödel  come to 
> life, and through his own passionate involvement in the ques t that the 
> various narrative strands come together.
>
> This is the URL of the website:
>
> http://www.logicomix.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=53
>
>
>
> Simon Bryquer
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "alice wellintown" 
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> >
> To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Saturday, August 08, 2009 8:55 AM
> Subject: Re: The Devil & Tom Foley Walker
>
>
>> "The Devil & Tom Walker" is a great tale by one America's most
>> important, now somewhat neglected, authors. I wish I could send some
>> paintings I have of the scenes with the Black Man. Several artists
>> have painted scenes from the tale. Cool. In any event, a cool book
>> that includes some Ryder paintings is Sarah Burns' _Painting the Dark
>> Side_, it’s now a Google book and can be located on the WWW.
>>
>> All this Foley in the Park stuff reminds me of a cover on one of  those
>> Vinelands, a black and white photograph of clear cut forest. And it
>> reminds me of that stinking Hell Frank ascends/descends, all stripped
>> of life (297). He meets his Beatrice/Dally and they ascend/descend
>> into a Miltonic Pandemonium Plus (Milton not Dante is credited with
>> the word, Pandemonium, PL Book I),  the Gallows Frame Saloon.  Sailor's
>> Grave (V.) and inverted stars (M&D) and what knots …the Walker
>> connection is a Classic Tripartite again.
>>
>> Remember the Zone  Herero regard the rocket as both their Destiny and
>> their Torah. (520) The Herero are Kabbalists. What are these magician
>> scholars trying to discover in the Torah or the Rocket? Like Slothrop
>> they are on a quest to find the Holy Center, Kansas, Home Dorothy and
>> ET, Woodstock for the Hippies, Self for Oedipus, Garden of America.
>>
>> Ezian says (319) it’s a Center they need to get back to, the Garde n, a
>> place without time, the journey without,  where every departure is a
>> return to the same place, the only place….Now these Kabbalists hop e to
>> get to the bottom of the womb/cave/Mother/….Netherworld-Moon, Holy
>> Center, Holy Center with exhaustive explication of  the Text and
>> shooting a rocket. Where? At the moon? Well the moon is a tomb or a
>> womb or a Center lost, like Eden,  that the Zone Herero can only  study
>> and get all mixed up in. The Herero conjunction of netherworld and
>> moon as Holy Center is parodied by the doctrines of other Rocket
>> cultists
>> in the novel.  Weisenburger says that TRP's accuracy on these
>> Kabbalistics "confirms that Scholem's Major Trends was his source in
>> these matters." On page 753 we have a count down.   There are ten
>> stages of the inner world through which God
>> descends-His revelation in the Shekinah. This ties back to Greta, but
>> here we get Fritz Lang's UFA film Die Frau im
>> Mond and the count down moves from film to Life As Film.  So Steve
>> Edelman, the Kabbalistic spokesman says, The Tree of Life itself was
>> brought into being, that is the Tree rooted at the Bodenplatte where
>> the dead abide, was brought into existence by "the Great Firing." The
>> Ten Sephiroth of the Tree (see Major Trends page 214 for a diagram)
>> are associated with the Rocket countdown;  you count down but the
>> Rocket goes up. The Rocket countdown "actually conceals the Tree of
>> Life." So once again,  the sacred guarantor of Return has been
>> co-opted by technological mysticism as part of a one-way process
>> designed to thwart the renewal of life. And, Captain Blicero, the guy
>> who wants to leave "this cycle of infection and death" imagines the
>> moon once reached by the Rocket will become "our new Deathkingdom", a
>> vacuous sphere inhabited by homosexual men. And what will Man be  then?
>> He will be reduced to little more than "black and white film-images."
>> And what of Man’s dreams? They will be dreaming not of warmth and
>> communion but of perpetual separation from "loved ones."  How they
>> will cherish their "loneliness."  They Fly Toward a "sterile grace."
>> It is an Absolutely unnatural Ideal.  A Black and White Heart of
>> Darkness: a vacuous parody of Earth's vital core, a glass sphere.
>>
>> THREE: NYC,  the Valley of Ashes, Long Island's rich great green
>> breast as seen through the Dutch Sailor's eyes, in The Great Gatsby.
>> Return or getting back to the Garden, to the Girl of his Dreams is a
>> quest that is destined to Fai, a Tragic quest. And why does he want a
>> Daisy when there is a Myrtle in the Valley of Ashes? The same reason
>> Myrtle is a consumer of prattle and Tom's violent wealth. Poor
>> Myrtle/Mary, flower of life; she is Henry Adams' Virgin Fecundity Run
>> Down by the Machine. In any event, The Romance is the obvious Pynchon
>> connection, but the Realism (Henry James) is also connected here.
>> Because Gatsby is a novel of machine manners, the constant flicker
>> (one of the best critical essays on Gatsby is Guy Reynold's, "The
>> Constant Flicker"), but also a Realistic novel about raw power. That
>> Power is Plutocracy. The novel is a battle of old and new money and
>> Myrtle (the Earth) gets run over. The Plutocracy, when challanged,
>> from below, by the Nego or the Jew or the soldier or the worker,  forms
>> a United Front, it will  send Kit of Booker T or Invisible Man to
>> "school" with a Telluride scholarship, and, even good soldiers, who
>> are needed when the cartels have family feuds on a grand scale, and
>> who obtain some equality when all is general issue, and may even get
>> to fuck a Daisy, must be made tragic. But the Daisy Chain turns as  the
>> billboard god's of commerce look on, and at least, for the preterite,
>> the Valley of Ashes will be a Park. A Moses project, it is where the
>> Worlds Fair was contructed and a beautiful Park now stands where the
>> ashes of industrialism once choked the life out of the Virgin.
>>
>> http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/vt_flushing_meadows/vt_flushing_meadows_park.html
> 